Shane Baylis

• PhD
• Monash University (Australia)

en Banding allows identification of individual birds, and many investigators use data from recaptured or recovered birds to infer population parameters, including survival rates, migration rates, and recruitment rates. Such analyses often assume that band loss is negligible, but wear rates have been found to differ markedly among different band siz...

Population mortality curves, otherwise known as lifetime distribution functions, can be indispensable in many areas of ecology and environmental management including population viability and stock management analyses, disaster‐recovery monitoring, and fundamental evolutionary biology. Yet available modeling tools are often unable to estimate popula...

Knowing how many individuals are in a wildlife population allows informed management decisions to be made. Ecologists are increasingly using technologies, such as remotely piloted aircraft (RPA; commonly known as “drones,” unmanned aerial systems or unmanned aerial vehicles), for wildlife monitoring applications. Although RPA are widely touted as a...

Ecologists are increasingly using technology to improve the quality of data collected on wildlife, particularly for assessing the environmental impacts of human activities. Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS; commonly known as ‘drones’) are widely touted as a cost-effective way to collect high quality wildlife population data, however, the val...

Conspecific brood parasitism (CP) is a facultative breeding tactic whereby females lay their eggs in the nests of conspecifics. In some species, potential hosts have evolved the ability to identify and reject foreign eggs from their nest. Previous studies suggest that the ubiquitous House Sparrow Passer domesticus in Spain and South Africa employs...

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) represent a new frontier in environmental research. Their use has the potential to revolutionise the field if they prove capable of improving data quality or the ease with which data are collected beyond traditional methods. We apply UAV technology to wildlife monitoring in tropical and polar environments and demonst...

When comparing lifespan (longevity) between species, it is common practice to take the maximum recorded longevity value within each species as a proxy of maximum lifespan. Whether maximum recorded longevity is a reliable proxy of species’ maximum longevity remains unclear. Some researchers correct for previously documented life history correlates o...

We investigated use of capsaicin, a chemical that evolved as a mammal-directed fruit-consumption deterrent for chili (Capsicum annum) fruits as a nest-predation deterrent. Capsaicin is unpalatable to mammals, but apparently undetectable by birds, and has been used as a selective mammal-repellent in several commercial applications. We placed imitati...